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A supplier is an upstream network that actually serves inference. Meridian routes to them, prices from their catalogs, and settles their payment challenges. Suppliers are registry entries, not hardcoded clients. The catalog tells you which ones are live, what they charge, and how they expect to be paid.

payment: none

chat.dphn.ai →

payment: x402

surplusintelligence.ai →

payment: x402

network.antseed.com →

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The registry

GET /v1/inference/providers returns each supplier with its capabilities, settlement details, and top-up metadata. Treat it as the source of truth rather than shipping constants in your client. Payment kinds are additive and clients should skip values they do not recognise:
  • none: call immediately. Dolphin is the current free supplier.
  • x402: call once for a validated 402 offer, sign it, retry with PAYMENT-SIGNATURE.
  • prepaid: fund the supplier balance using its registry topup block.

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Namespaced model ids

Every model is addressed as supplier/upstream-model-id:
That naming is the whole portability story. When a supplier is added, removed, or reprices, the catalog changes and your request shape does not.

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Dolphin

The free tier at chat.dphn.ai. Chat runs without a wallet and without a payment challenge, and it is the only supplier that exposes templates: named styles such as logical (the default) or creative variants, fetched from /v1/inference/templates. Sending a template to any other supplier is rejected.

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Surplus

The first paid supplier and an OpenAI-compatible marketplace at surplusintelligence.ai. Hundreds of models, each carrying its own per-token input and output price in the catalog. Meridian does not choose a seller. Surplus routes each request to its cheapest healthy seller internally, so you get marketplace pricing without running the matching yourself. Settlement is USDC on Base. Your prepaid balance is literally the USDC balance of your derived buyer key, so it is verifiable onchain and withdrawable at any time.

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Cost of a request

You sign Surplus’s own x402 challenge and Surplus is the only payee. Meridian takes no margin on chat. The app caps any single paid message so a malformed challenge cannot drain a balance, and the facilitator validates every challenge server-side before relaying it.

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Failure behaviour

If Surplus is unavailable, paid chat is unavailable; free Dolphin chat is unaffected. There is no automatic cross-supplier failover today because pricing and model identity differ per supplier, so switching is a catalog choice you make, not a silent substitution.

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AntSeed

A peer-to-peer inference network at network.antseed.com where independent sellers run nodes. Its catalog is live peer data: models appear while sellers are online, priced from the cheapest available peer. Funding works today: the top-up gateway credits an AntseedDeposits balance on Base, and the balance shows in the finance panel. Chat is deferred until the per-request node bridge ships, so AntSeed models render in the marketplace as coming soon.
Availability, pricing, modality, and payment mechanics are registry data. Always read the current /v1/inference/models and /v1/inference/providers responses instead of caching them as client constants.

Inference API

Endpoint reference for the catalog and chat surfaces.

Funding

How prepaid supplier balances get credited.